Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Finally, Wowhead has taken the cache from the armory and uploaded it. Which means I can do my gear list without having to do weird multiple parses or use Rawr for values or whatever, and you get nice, shiny mouseovers. Oh yeah, and the weight scale works too.

I've updated my weight scale as well. As always, the big word of advice: this is a static weighing that does not take into account your personal situation, your gear, or your general needs. Always use intelligence and reason before using this as gospel.

Also - know that we have no idea what Arthas drops. Chances are he's going to drop some jewelry, cloaks and weapons if he's like all the other end bosses. So this loot table is going to change.

Some changes between previous iterations and this one:

1) Haste and crit have swapped in value. This is primarily because we're getting closer to the crit cap, and as a result crit is becoming less and less valuable. This mostly factors in in gem choices; the agi/haste gem is in general more valuable than the agi/crit gem.

2) Hit and expertise both have been increased in value. This is again because of the crit cap. Why does this matter? Well, before you could have a table of attacks where every attack you replaced via hit rating/expertise rating went from a miss/dodge to a normal hit. But with being at the crit cap or close to it, you're to the point where every rating point replaces a crit instead. Because this is the case, every missed attack becomes a much bigger loss of damage than it was before. Again, this is more important as you get higher gear, but the really important thing to note is that getting hit/exp capped is very good. And as you get close to the arpen hard cap (if you choose to do that) hit/expertise becomes the most valuable stat of all.

In any case, look to cap these things or what you can do to cap them, especially if it won't hurt you otherwise. What this might mean in practice is that agi/hit gems become better than haste or crit for hybrid gems.

3) Arpen is still great, as is agi. No big change here, though arpen has been improved slightly (similar to 3.1 values) because of the ability to hit the arpen hard cap. If you choose not to do this, keep this in mind when looking at the ratings (or adjust them yourself).

A word of advice too: you desperately want to get the 4-piece T10 bonus. It's stellar. As a result of this, you should take the leather piece recommendations with a grain of salt. Certainly don't buy things like the chest or the hands from the vendor without some thought; while they might be better than anything you can get from 25-man normal, you don't want to lose your 4-piece or waste badges unnecessarily on something you can't upgrade later.

Finally - why did I do cat first? Well, mostly because I'm raiding as a cat as my primary, which means this is more relevant . me personally. I should be getting to the bear list in a couple of days.

Because there's so little in the other drops (one 25-man, one 10-man agility cloak in 12 bosses?) I strongly suspect that Arthas has a cloak. This goes well with the general idea of bosses dropping loot that's most applicable to everyone and totally awesome. Still, Anub'arak holds awesome stuff - it's a great high-ilvl cloak with arpen, so it's rated highly. Because of the new rankings, the Shawl of Nerubian Silk rates quite highly as well - and it's easy to get. It plus the 264-level T10 legs caps a cat for expertise too.

It might also seem odd to see strength so high on these lists, but because of the high multipliers that cats can get to stats and how well cats can scale with AP, it's pretty decent.

While the Sack of Wonder is fairly highly ranked, don't kill yourself trying to get it; it's a stopgap piece that will help you until you get a good T10 piece upgraded. My personal take is to gem it for tanking and DPS (so pure agi) and use it in my cat when I upgrade my head (so I maintain some expertise) and legs (so I replace the hit a bit). In other bizarre news, the heroic Chestguard of the Frigid noose apparently has one less socket than the normal version, as does the heroic version of the Sack of Wonder; I expect that to change.

Yawn. Another boring upgrade path for boots, with no real surprises. Well, there's one I suppose; if you don't want the expertise cloak or ring, you can get expertise from crafted boots. But that's not great; the difference between them and the heroic version of the 25-man boots (which should be one of the earlier heroic-25 man drops, coming from Marrowgar) is quite substantial.

Gah. So many ring choices. For that reason, I suspect that Arthas isn't going to drop another one. There are 3 different agility ring drops at the 25-man level already. I don't see there being a 4th. I hate this category just because there are so many combinations of loot and gear and strength DPS vs agility DPS that is almost, but not quite, useful. What is useful to note is that the three 25-man rings have either arpen, expertise or hit - so they can all be very good or meh depending on the rest of your gear. The ashen band is an interesting story too. Right now the proc rate appears to be absurdly low, making it suboptimal - but it still is a good ring with hit on it.

This is the one slot where the T10 doesn't actually win, so that's my recommendation - use this for your offset enjoyment if you can. Which kinda sucks since it's one of the cheaper ones, but so it goes. And there are a lot of options for upgrades too, which is nice; you can even splurge on the Cat Burglar grips and not feel bad about it at all. Note that while the Aldriana's are an upgrade, it's not like it's a huge one; you could easily get this and instead go for your offset piece in another slot, and that's especially true if you're doing 10-man only.

Thank the FSM that we didn't have the punishment sack or the discarded bag of entrails as the best in slot, right? I mean...yeesh. Dodged a bullet there. I don't think anyone wants the tauren gimp suit as the BiS. Though despite being a level lower, the Discarded bag is quite strong, itemization wise. This is one of the higher priorities for me to get personally, as while it will break my 2pT9 bonus, it will have arpen on the head and will be a bigger upgrade than most other things I can get.

This is one of the odd ones; the T10 is so hugely above anything else as an option it's not funny, and it's also hugely above the old gear as well. As a result, it likely should be your first choice for spending badges unless you've got serious deficiencies in other slots. There's no real reason to consider other gear unless you happen to be high in expertise; then this is devalued, but only by a bit.

Sigh. More noisy strength items that you're not likely to roll on unless you hate the strength-using people in your raid. This is a spot where I think it's likely Arthas drops something, given that there's all of one raid drop for the slot for agility in 25-man and at least two from 10. So something's missing. It's going to be hard to beat Sindragosa though - it has haste and arpen, a great combination for cats.

Another place where the tier gear blows away the competition pretty handily, though the 10-man drop is quite good and an interesting sidegrade if you haven't got the tier piece and want arpen. Likely because it's cheap, this will be one of your earlier upgrades to T10, so chances are you won't be having anything else for long.

As usual, I'm using Rawr's ratings of trinkets, and because of that it's weighing based on whether or not I'd hit the cap with arpen with said trinket. And even with that limitation, the deathbringer's will wins handily. What trinkets will be best for you is going to depend a lot on whether or not you're going for hard cap arpen or not. If not, you want one of the mjolnir/grim toll (which is surprisingly decent with that hit rating) or the scorpion + deathbringer's will/death's choice/fanged skull/herkuml war token. If yes, you want deathbringer's will and death's choice or whispering fanged skull. I also expect this to be another slot where there is loot to be discovered.

Another fairly boring upgrade path, made only slightly interesting by having an emblem purchase be somewhat competitive at the normal 25 level. If you're low on hit, consider the Lady Deathwhisper drop - but really, there's not a lot of special analysis here. Get the tribute to the creator of Rawr.

Another tribute item to the most influential theorycrafter for cats out there, and it's the best. Makes it very easy. I left off a bunch because honestly, if you don't have at least something on this list (and even if you do) you should get the Bracers of Swift Death made. The mats are fairly cheap and it's easy to get now. Weapons:

This is one of those hard ones. The top-end mace is actually quite good, though not quite as good as the top-end feral staff...for cats. (for bears it's likely much higher). Do you roll on it? It gives hit, which is nice, but no arpen. I'd try and stay with the feral gear as much as you can, but it's awfully tempting to get a giant mace and have fun with it in cat and bear. Plus, all three are close enough together that it'll be a huge upgrade, DPS wise. Try in general to be nice, but don't be too nice I suppose :)

Rawr doesn't have the new idol, but it's more a bear than a cat one. At best (when you're not losing rake or moving too much) it's going to be a 10% upgrade from mutilation. Definitely not worth the emblems until you've got everything else you want.

Which pieces are you planning to sacrifice best in slot (and usually armor pen) for hit? I got pretty lucky in ToGC 25 so I've got a minute to think about it, but I'm still not sure what the optimal way to get within spitting distance of the cap, especially since I suspect a heroic Cryptmaker might be something of a tough sell.

Anon2 - I think that the 4piece is hugely worth it under most circumstances. It's about a 6-7% boost to DPS by itself assuming 200% crits on rake, which is akin to about 400 more DPS for most people. No minor upgrade to any piece is going to touch that. Add to that that the chest is still best in slot, and it's not really a contest. This time, the tier pieces (for cats at least) are not only good because of the set bonus, they're actually really strong.

My personal plan is the same as yours - get the offset gloves and get everything else in the set.

Mittnacht - the Cat link has been updated, the only one that hadn't been was the PTR. Both are changed now.

Asp - heroic cryptmaker is going to be a hard sell, no mistake. I think my goal is to get the cloak from 10-man, use the Ashen Band as one of my two rings (rings are hard to get anyway, so might as well make it easy) and then gem/enchant for the rest. Cryptmaker would be stellar, but I can't imagine the crying that the ret paladins and DKs would do if that was done.

Cryptmaker may be easier to get than you realize. Many of our DKs, Warrior and Paladins will be getting at least Shadow's Edge, if not Shadowmourne. Bryntroll is also in high demand amongst that group as well.

Don, you have an interesting point. I'd imagine that the DK tanks would want cryptmaker, but you're likely right - shadow's edge is going to be the defacto choice for a lot of folks and the stats on this aren't so compelling that they'd likely pass that up for it.

Hmm.

Numerically the staves are better DPS even if you can use all that hit, but it does help out a lot; hit is very, very hard to come by nicely.

Kal, Clearly I am spastic or my computer is doing something wacky, but when I click the link to cat wowhead says it can't find matching items, and crit is still valued higher than haste on the filter. Any chance you can post your static gear weighting values?Mitty

Thanks for the guide as always, the one thing I factor in is tanking. My guild is over run with alts so we do 2 25 man icc and 4 or 5 10 man's so i like to keep the tank set updated as well. Anyway to the point gloves and chest are the best duplicate use items; the enchants are the same and you can almost gem them the same. Which means grabbing 6 pieces of tier gear instead.

Anon - I do agree that chest & gloves are the best to get if you're needing to keep both your cat and bear set up to date, even though that means (for bears) missing out on a lot of expertise. I'd probably have the legs as the offtier piece in that situation, as they have the enchant that most drastically changes between the two. That, or the head.

Also - yeah, it should be a DPS upgrade to go from 2pT9 + offtier 258 gear to 4pT10, even at level 251-grade. Though don't make that switch until you have all four pieces.

I use RAWR and run a number of what if scenarios. When I do an ArPen hardcap focus I end up with 0 expertise and well below the hitcap. Yet these deficiencies don't seem to affect the ranking much of the gem selections. Expertise and hit gems are generally listed lower than agility.

I was just having that haste discussion the other day with another feral. Given that the haste cap is at 75percent. With raid buffs and the potential gear upgrades available hitting the low 70s is not too hard. At what point would you recommend leaning more towards +haste gear?

The quality of the 4piece bonus on this tier has made my gear choices much tougher. I have the cloak from KT so the badge cloak would be a significant upgrade. But that would set me back 50badges from getting the 4piece bonus. oy vay...

Willowbear - I'd not trust Rawr right now. I don't think they've reasonably taken into account things like the crit cap for white hits and they've still got some bugs. That doesn't mean it's going to be horrible - just inaccurate.

In general, you can avoid being hit/exp capped or even have much of it, and still be pretty well off. My personal findings were that when you got very high levels of crit and high levels of arpen, hit/expertise became way more valuable than agi. But that was just me.

I don't think you'll ever be bad for going hit/expertise either. It might not be perfectly optimal, but as you get higher crit rates (so each hit% is actually losing a crit) and you get more arpen (so each crit hits harder) you'll find they become more valuable.

With the lack of hit rating on the t10 gear what pieces are you looking at to fulfill the hit rating. I know it's not terribly important for feral but I hate missing so I generally strive to be hit/exp capped.

Thank you very much for the work you have put into these lists. It really helps to put things into perspective for gearing. The questions I have now, which will probably become clear once more gear is obtainable -

1. For regemming to haste instead of crit, at what gear point do you actually hit the crit cap, and is it attainable without ilvl 277 gear? (eg only doing h10, n10, n25, and assuming you have hit/exp caps)

2. For eventually pushing towards passive arp cap, I assume the first requirement is to have passive arp in nearly every slot on your character. When the gear is attainable for doing this, will that actually change the gear weights in favor of items that have passive arp over say, hit/exp/ap gear? (e.g. heroic Hersir's Greatspear vs. normal mode Distant Land)

Most discussion of stats and items are very vague with respect to an individual toon's current gear, but assuming you have the 4pT10 with offset gloves and are hit/exp capped, it would be great to have some clarification on hard numbers of crit cap as well as more discussion about hard arp cap and what minimum gear level it takes to convert from soft cap + trinket to passive stats (w/ deathbringer's will) etc. Thanks again for the help!

Ah, Willow - sorry, I misunderstood. I'll go into that a bit more, but I did do an article recently on that ( the cat in the cap post which details some of it. It's really going to depend a lot on your trinket procs and your weapon enchant, but the important point is to note that most of the time, it's still okay to get some; it's just not as great as it might be.

Anon - as I said above, I'm likely going to go with hit on rings and maybe the cloak, and then possibly use hit food and some hit enchants depending. Precious is looking like it'll be a better enchant than agility right now at higher end gear levels. I'm not going to wear worse things to get hit capped though. Hit will be very valuable when you're getting closer to the arpen cap and the crit cap, but 'really valuable' doesn't mean 'get hit capped or fail' like it does for spellcasters.

Delane - those are all really good questions, and thanks for asking them. I'll probably have to go into those more in their own post, as they require a bit more work and explanation than works as a comment. But to quickly answer the questions: you can certainly hit the crit cap for white attacks (see the above link) with procs from trinkets and goose and debuffs using pre-277 gear. You can even hit it pre-264 gear. Weights for arpen will change somewhat as you get more of it until you get 1400, but for the most part it's not going to ever be so valuable that you want to forsake everything just to get it. For instance, it's not a good idea to use lower level gear just to get the arpen cap. That being said, Heroic Hersir's Greatspear ranks above Distant Land anyway.

My personal goal is to switch to arpen when I get at least 1100 arpen with gear and gemming. Or...more likely, when I get a second good trinket that I'd want to use over Mjolnir. Deathbringer's Will, Helkamr, Death's Choice would all make me swap to arpen. I suspect that if I don't get the trinket I want I'll swap around the time I get 4pT10, since all of that has arpen on it.

I'm a bit curious what your plans are to get to the ArPen hardcap. You've mentioned Distant Land as being the best non-heroic weapon for cats, but it doesn't have even a whisper of ArPen on it. That's about a 110 ArPen loss from what I have now and 129 ArPen loss from what I was looking at (Hersir's non-heroic).

Willowbear - I haven't quite figured that out. My gut feeling is that I won't be quite hitting the cap, but that's okay; it's still going to be more valuable provided I can get DBW.

Most models show that not hitting cap + a good weapon is better than hitting the cap with a subpar weapon. This isn't like casters where you have to hit the cap first and foremost; it's that arpen is more valuable as you get more of it.

But it's not so much more valuable that you should kill yourself getting it.

Agreed. My rational for Hersir's was the ArPen and Hit on it. But the difference between that and Distant Land is so great that I'm rethinking things.

We just had DBW drop last week. We use a double suicide kings list and my best bidding number was near the top of the list. There was only a couple dps that could out bid me and I knew one wasn't interested. But of course I lost my bid to the other, a fury warrior. It was a good loss though. She always tops our dps meters. I run with her in 10 mans too.

So I don't know if I have missed something or if I am just crazy. We have 2 feral kitties in our guild on fail furnace I mean blood furnace, myself (hornybulls) and lilroche. Now was have been doing an ongoing experiment on gemming agility versus arm penn. I have always been a fan or gemming for agililty and picking up the arm penn from gear. Prior to my glove upgrade to T10.5 (which apparently aren't that good compare to others...oh well) I was sitting at 509 arm penn with 61% crit and 9K self buffed attack power. Lilroche on the other hand has been striving to hit the arm penn cap and from what I was told by him yesterday he is almost at 100%.

Now...his gear atm does outrank mine....but I do have 2, 2 set bonuses (T9.5 and T10.5). I find that he has a greater burst dps (first 15-30 seconds) then I do, but I always tend to finish above him on a pure dps fight with a higher sustained dps. I am currently planning on continuing to use agility but switching agil/crit for agility haste as I do use mongoose (omg sooo bad according to many). I am just curious as to what the dps numbers are across kitties on say a 25 normal Saurfang fight (since there isn't a lot of moving required by melee).

So my original intent when icc came out was to hit ArP hard cap ASAP, and next week i could have feasibly done it, I got both cryptmaker and distant land... but after weighing them out (and pressure from plate dps in my guild), I took DL. This entire ArP cap/hit rating puzzle would be trivial with that mace, but christ I lose so much crit and haste I couldn't hold on to it. Not only am I losing tons of ArP from the staff, my hit situation is absolutely horrid now... Especially if I want to grab the Noose in my belt slot to finish out the arp hard cap. I'll get my t10 helm this week and replace Mask of Lethal Intent (82 hit rating).

The point I'm trying to make is how bad is simply soft capping ArP? Having crunched the numbers, after my desired badge gear upgrades, if I were to gem pure agi instead of arp I would have exactly enough arp to toss on the old Grim Toll and treat this place like Ulduar/ToC... Though I realize GT is pretty poor now, I'm currently using Banner of Victory, and the 83 hit is a perfect replacement, while allowing me to push well above 2k agility (My other trinket is DBW, so I imagine the dual procs would be huge burst as well). With 4pc t10 I imagine the emphasis on crit/ap is going to be even stronger.

I have been doing a lot of number crunching as well trying to figure out a way to balance hit, exp, crit, agility, and arm penn. I currently gem pure agility and have DBW and a 2 set T10.5 and 2 set T9.5. I have the frostbitten furr boots on me, but had the footpads of impending death crafted to make up for my expertise lost when I replace my helm. I found I took a dps loss getting rid of the 2-2sets so I'm going to hold off on the helm for now and keep the footpads for my tank set.

My gear choices and itemization is based on my thoughts to benefit both my dps set (25 mans) and my tanking set (10 mans MT).I am trying to keep a few cross spec pieces (chest, shoulders, gloves). My plans as of now are to try to cap hit and expertise with some of the avaiable gear pieces. I'm going for a 4-set between shoulders, hands, helm, and legs. I'm going to try to get my hands on the chest from the gunship as it has a hell of a lot of hit rating and would be an awesome shared piece between tanking and dps set. With the toskks wrists, badge cloak and belt, frostbitten fur boots, distant land, wodin's lucky neck, exaulted ring, band of bone colossus and DBW I would be at exactly 283 hit and about 172 expertise. Would be about 584 arm penn and 717 crit from gear alone and enchants (no gems). I have these numbers written down somewhere, so if they are off it is because I am typing this off the top of my head. Our main boomkin has quit wow, so I will be trying to hit the cap for hit in case we don't get a new one soon. I am also currently seeking the needle encrusted scorpian to replace my death's choice as I currently proc up to 88% crit during fights and am way over cap and am not going to regem my gear since it will be replaced soon. I think once I get all the gear I want I will be balancing the arm penn and agility gems to keep close to the crit cap while still benefiting from arm penn.

I am hoping we get some of those drops this weeks and that our rogue and other feral back off of my stuff. Kind of sad when the most undergeared of the 3 (me) does the most dps.

Just a side note, with the gear I have now, I do about 7.5-8.5k dps. It is nice beating classes that just sit and dps and dont have to worry about brezng and innervating :)

I hope my rambling helps a little, now I'm sure there will be some arguments that I am wrong, but whatever. What more can you ask from a lady.

Dean - soft-capping ArPen can be more effective than hard capping it. It really depends on how much you have to sacrifice in order to get there. It's not some magical place where if you hit it you're going to be unstoppable or hugely more powerful than before.

That being said, the emphasis is not going to be on crit; crit is going to decrease significantly as you get closer to the white hit cap. AP also isn't so hot. What is hot is haste, and especially hit and expertise. And to a lesser extent strength.

I was soft-capped with Mjolnir and managed to get around 9.2-9.5k on Saurfang, though that's exacerbated by us going really fast on him. That's about right for my numbers on Festergut too. So you can do very good DPS with soft-capping.

My goal originally was to switch to hardcapping when getting DBW. But even then, I knew I wasn't going to get to 1400 without sacrificing a bunch, and most of the time it's not worth it. By hard capping that meant taking two trinkets that didn't proc arpen and gemming for arpen. Hitting 1100-1200 is still going to be quite good on a lot of fights, especially ones with adds.

Hard cap for armor pen is doable. Since they took the armorpen proc off of deathbringers will it would seem that, keeping at soft-capp, with the needle encrusted scorpion will be the way to go. With the calculations I have done, it would seem that the only effective way to reach hard cap with a segnificant about of crit requires that we pick up the cryptmaker or the great spear. Hitting hard cap the right way, appears like it will require some pretty specific gear. I doubt many people will have the ability to cherry pick the perfect pieces. Balancing the gear list without sacrificing seems to be the major challenge. Cryptmaker seems to be the best way to make up hit without loosing armor pen. Its really quite suprising that Distant Land does not have armor pen at all. I think we must have another feral staff out there, we need a direct upgrade to Twins pact. Hard cap gets tuff when you concider that very little ICC gear has hit and Armor pen on it. Gear like TOGC icewalker treds become really valuable to fill in the gaps.

I appreciate the gear list that you make a lot - thanks for that.Now I have two questions and sorry if you heard them already over and over.1. Why is haste so important and how much haste do I need. From other cats I have always heard that haste is crap but you say that it is good. Could you explain me why and how much I need.2. If just got the t10.5 gloves. Shoudl I use these and let out the shoulders or should I go for all 5 T10 pieces or shoudl I replace my t10,5 gloves for the gloves that I can get for badges?Thank you for your answers..

If you are hit caped (with gear), exp. caped (with gear), and almost crit caped, wouldn't the next thing you would want to go for is attack power (1 strength = 2.36 attack power, because 1 agility only = 1.18 attack power and you don't need the crit from it). Or are you saying that being crit caped you will do more white damage at a faster rate when stacking more haste making it more valuable than attack power? My plan was to get hit caped with Festergut's neck, Deathwisper's belt, the rep. ring, and Rotface's staff. Expertise cap from the 4 t10 gear (off piece gloves) and crafted boots. We are a 10 man strict raiding guild, so we can't wear 25 man gear. Beat I can do for trinkets are Scorpion and WFS.

ThinkTank bio

About Me

Kalon likes playing tanks, no matter how hard he tries to fight it. He is not as hardcore as many but spends a lot of time thinking about WoW, and randomly rants about it now and then. He played formerly on the Argent Dawn (EU) server and was a founding member of Fire and Blood (Quel'Dorei) before joining Casually Serious, a guild devoted to hard core progression on only 8 hours of raiding time a week.
He is a devoted husband, father, and when he has the time programs software.